September 2014

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Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

September 2014

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Garden Club Kicks off 2014-15 Season

Monday Sept. 22 @ 7:00 p.m. 
Pitkin Community Center

Our September meeting will feature Jim Woodworth speaking about the Great Meadows Conservation Trust – incorporated in 1968 by concerned citizens of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill and Glastonbury as a non-profit tax exempt land trust to protect and preserve the Great Meadows.  Open to the public – bring a prospective member!

V.P. John Swingen is regretfully leaving the Garden Club as he and Anne are moving to Carson City, Nevada in September where Anne, has been offered a new job as the State Administrator of Ag Education.  Best of luck to a good member and friend and we look forward to hearing about the future adventures of the Men’s Garden Club of Carson City.

2014-2015 Club Officers

President:  Tony Sanders                  
Vice President: open       

Secretary: James Sulzen                   
Treasurer: Richard Prentice

Compostable Matter

By Jim Meehan

We are on the cusp of autumn and our pokeweed is in full bloom and dripping with ripe berries

       

Some of you may recall the initial appearance of this poisonous perennial from two summers ago when it popped up in the unintended sun garden that began creating itself after we reluctantly had to remove some of our major shade-producing trees.  I circulated a photo of our newest unknown resident amongst my garden-savvy friends.   

Several plant people easily identified our intruder.   One close friend – a Master Gardener and a guest at our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding – pointed out to me that “the very creative flower arranger used pokeweed, with those beautiful purple berries, plus some other stuff, including something that reminded me a little of lunaria, altho it was different and someone mentioned that it was an invasive weed. Gorgeous arrangements.”

       

Neither Mars, nor I, nor our son and (very horticulturally on the ball) daughter-in-law remembered.  Depending on where your mind is at, what’s decoration to some can be the focal centerpiece to others.  That’s probably why there are wedding planners to take care of some of the details and make certain that it all comes together.

       

Based on the feedback we decided to keep the plant and see what developed.  In fact its arrival and the need to replace our fried shade plants with some more solar-thirsty varieties prompted Mars and me to seek out other berry-producing/bird attracting bushes.  (We assumed, without really checking, that the pokeweed’s toxicity would not affect the avian guests we were hoping to attract.  Based on the lack of feathered corpses at the base of the flower we apparently were correct.)

       

Some of the newbies, such as Little Henry, were purchased.  Most just showed up.  Also this summer I made a concerted effort not to prune back any shrub until I was absolutely certain that it’s floral/fruit life cycle has run its course – rather than trying to maintain that neat, trimmed appearance.  Fortunately none of the areas got that close to the abandoned property look. 

       

We did have our arborist come and trim away all of the small competitive trees that were stunting the growth of the unpremeditated flowering crab that showed up a few feet down from the Pokeweed.  When we bought this house thirty-seven years ago there were three such trees – a pair at the opposite end of the property and one in about the middle. 

       

The duo was more bush-like than tree-like and every couple of years I would basically lop them to the ground and watch them reassemble themselves into a slightly different configuration of intertwined berry-bearing branches.  It was an every other autumn activity that I actually looked forward to – relatively hard outdoor work on a relatively cool day with a definite result.

       

The third one was our bird feeder holder until disease caused its flowers to disappear and its wood to crumble.  They are all gone now but their branches still pop up pretty much everywhere.  This one that we are now nurturing has the good fortune of being someplace where we want it at a time when we are switching to a more bird-centric landscape design.

       

The biggest surprise of this summer however was a four-foot tall plant with a thickish green stem at the end of which was a large (about the size of my hand) white composite flower head much like an oversized but more delicate Queen Anne’s Lace – or maybe (since I was hungry at the time) one of those Munson chocolate nonpareil candies.  I noticed it sometime in late July.  In August it suddenly vanished.  And in place of the pale petals were tiny red fruits – one per former floret, or so it seemed.  It was a magical illusion worth of Penn and Teller – performed without any paranormal trickery or human sleight-of-hand.

       

Not realizing the dramatic change that was coming I didn’t think to take a picture of the plant’s floral incarnation to send to my panel of gardening gurus.  Internet searches haven’t worked either.

      

 Meanwhile the birds seemed not to care that their latest source of nutrition remained unidentified.  Depending on where your mind is at, what’s decoration to some can be the focal centerpiece to others.  That’s why Mars and I are letting Mother Nature take the lead in this garden plan.

You Know You’re Addicted to Gardening When… :

author unknown, submitted by Walt Kiser

 http://www.growyourownnevada.com

Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas, rubber clogs and a cup of coffee.

You grab other people’s banana peels, coffee grinds, apple cores, etc. for your compost pile.

You have to wash your hair to get your fingernails clean.

All your neighbors come and ask you questions.

You know the temperature of your compost every day.

You buy a bigger truck so that you can haul more mulch.

You enjoy crushing Japanese beetles because you like the sound that it makes.

Your boss makes “taking care of the office plants” an official part of your job description.

Everything you touch turns to “fertilizer.”

Your non-gardening spouse becomes conversant in botanical names.

You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go, even at funerals.

You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial landscapers remove them to plant annuals.

You plan vacation trips around the locations of botanical gardens, arboreta, historic gardens, etc.

You sneak home a 7-foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your spouse will notice.

When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.

You always carry a shovel, bottled water and a plastic bag in your trunk as emergency tools.

You appreciate your Master Gardener badge more than your jewelry.

You talk “dirt” at baseball practice.

You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.

You like the smell of horse manure better than Estee Lauder.

You rejoice in rain… even after 10 straight days of it.

You have pride in how bad your hands look.

You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter.

You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.

Soil test results actually mean something.

You understand what IPM means and are happy about it.

You’d rather go to a nursery to shop than a clothes store.

You know that Sevin is not a number.

You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour.”

You look at your child’s sandbox and see a raised bed.

You ask for tools for Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, your birthday and any other occasion you can think of.

You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away.

You scold total strangers who don’t take care of their potted plants.

You know how many bags of fertilizer/potting soil/mulch your car will hold.

You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score extra bags of leaves for your compost pile.

Your preferred reading matter is seed catalogs.

And last but not least:

You know that the four seasons are:

Planning the Garden

Preparing the Garden

Gardening ~and~

Preparing and Planning for the next Garden.

The Secret To Making The Best 
Tomato Sandwich In The World

The Huffington Post  | By Julie R. Thomson

It's here. Tomato season. The plants have been growing since March, but the fruit just arrived in July. And now that August is finally here, those green globes are turning shades of red, orange and yellow and slowly sweetening. When the fruit turns ripe, the tomato problem quickly shifts from being without to stocking an overwhelming abundance. It's a great problem to have.

       

With tomato salads, tomato sauces and tomato salsas to be had, there's a good many things to make with the bounty of summer tomatoes. But all those recipes pale in comparison to the tomato sandwich (of which you should be eating at least one a day during the month of August). This is not a sandwich with tomato in it, but a sandwich made of nothing more than summer's sweetest fruit. Thick, summer-ripe tomato slices and white sandwich bread (with mayo, of course). That's it.

       

Blackberry Farm's master gardener John Coykendall, a genius on the topic of heirloom tomatoes, shared the secret to building the best tomato sandwich: "To me there's one requirement. Of course you have to have tons of mayonnaise and salt and pepper, but the true requirement is you have to have that old, cheap, white bread. The kind you wouldn't ordinarily touch in your daily life. It's the one thing that it was created for, tomato sandwiches. You stand over the sink [eating it] and it runs like Niagara Falls -- it's wonderful."

Horti-Culture Corner

Tomato Haiku by John Egerton

Beefsteak behemoth,

Cover my entire sandwich

With a single slice.

Invasives in the Garden: ‘You’ll Love It. It’ll Spread!’

http://nourishingwords.net

Most gardeners have been there at some point. Whether faced with a tiny yard or wide open spaces, filling our newly dug garden with perennials seemed a daunting task. Heading to the local nursery to get the job done is often not feasible, depending on the size of the garden.

       

Sharing plants and plant wisdom is one of my most favorite things about gardening. Gardeners are generous people by nature and seem to love to share plants and to teach each other what they know. I was a blank slate when I moved into my current home and started carving gardens out of the sandy soil, and my friends were there to help.    Not only do I remember and recognize every single perennial in my garden that was given to me by a friend, but I remember the odd little stories that go along with each.

      

 I’m famously bad at remembering plant names, but I have one plant in my long perennial border that, at least ten years after receiving it from a friend, I still call the “specimen plant.” When she so generously arrived with one more in a series of boxes of confusing balls of soil and roots, she pulled one clump out, saying, “this one is a real specimen plant.”

      

 I’m sure I’d be a better person if I knew its real name but this makes me smile every time, remembering the many plants she shared with me to help me get that forty-foot border started.

      

 Unfortunately, not all memories of plant gifts make me smile. In fact, a few make me curse.

       

A gardening coworker, about fourteen years ago, offered me white violets that she was supposedly “dividing” in her garden. Recalling early childhood garden moments spent picking tiny bouquets of purple violets and johnny jump-ups, I envisioned a similarly pleasant scene in my new garden. Encouragingly, she said, “You’ll love them; they’ll spread.” I don’t think she had love in her heart when she made that offer.

       

Those blasted white violets are the most invasive plants my garden has encountered. Any attempt to dig them up only causes them to retaliate by multiplying. Allowing them to show their sweet little blooms is sure to result in thousands of tiny seedlings the next spring. Their knobby roots make them ridiculously hard to remove.

      

 At about the same time, I wandered into a not so reputable nursery, in search of cheap perennials. I found a pretty, variegated plant, that the owner told me was a groundcover that “would spread beautifully.” He told me it was ajuga, although I’m sure he didn’t specify what variety. I really only heard the words “spread beautifully.” I bought one.

       

I’ve spent hundreds of hours, I’m sure, digging ajuga from all corners of my yard. It’s now growing behind my yard in the woods, not seeming to care if it has sun or not. I have since learned of, and acquired, a couple of very well-behaved, small purple ajugas, but this one would eat my shed if left alone. It spreads by sending out runners, then putting down roots wherever it can, which is anywhere.

       

If I were at all entrepreneurial, I’d probably dig all the ajuga plants in my yard up (as I imagine that nursery owner must have done), pot them and sell them from a fly-by-night roadside stand. I could make a big sign saying, “Perfect Plants: Will Spread Like Crazy!”

       

A north country friend is establishing a new shade garden and I’ve offered to share a few things from my garden. Of course, I love the idea that she might walk through her yard one day and remember a story about a plant I passed along. Mindful of having been wronged by at least one generous gardener of the past (not a friend–friends know they’ll be around when the cursing begins years later), I’m considering giving her a box of my favorite all-time ground cover, sweet woodruff.

       

Sweet woodruff does spread. It blooms in May into a beautiful flotilla of tiny white blossoms. In my garden, it spreads in a slow, predictable way. It doesn’t burrow under the foundation and appear on the other side of the house, or leap through the air. It just spreads a little more and becomes a little more dense each year.

       

Can I be assured it will behave this way in another garden? As long as she’s not planting it in a very wet area, it should behave itself. It’s a little risky, but it’s a beautiful plant, so I’ll take the risk. If I hear my friend cursing in a few years, I’ll be there to help.

The Race to Grow the One-Ton Pumpkin

By Julia Scott The New York Times

“When they are really at their peak growth, they'll make a sound,” said Don Young, a competitive pumpkin grower in Des Moines. To water his crop takes 27,000 gallons a month, and 80 sprinkler heads.

       

Don Young of Iowa grows his pumpkins by grafting double sprouts. He also raises hanging long gourds.

       

EARLY one morning about a month ago, Don Young peeled the floral bedsheets off the giant pumpkins growing in his backyard. Tiptoeing around the jungly vines, he carefully checked for holes. Then, bending his ear down over the nearest gourd, which was as high as his gut and wider than a truck tire, he gave it a solid smack and listened intently, like a doctor with a stethoscope.

      

 “This one’s thumping pretty good,” he said with a grin.

      

 Mr. Young is one of a number of amateur gardeners whose heart’s desire is to raise a pumpkin bigger than anybody else’s. These enthusiasts have always been obsessed, but now they are especially so. With the current world record at 1,810 pounds (a Smart car, by comparison, weighs 1,600 pounds), these growers can see the most important milestone of all on the horizon: the one-ton pumpkin. Galvanized by the prospect, they are doubling their efforts and devising a raft of new strategies involving natural growth hormones, double grafting and more, to become the first to reach that goal.

       

This fall’s pumpkin contests have begun, and as many as 14 amateur growers have won regional weigh-offs with entries tipping the scales at more than 1,500 pounds. The contests are far from over — they continue in force over the next two weekends — but already one pumpkin, raised by Dave Stelts of Edinburg, Pa., has come within three pounds of beating the 1,810-pound record set last year. Rumor has it that a record-breaker may emerge in California.

      

 The extreme summer weather this year has somewhat dampened the prospects of many growers in the Midwest, including Mr. Young. Still, he plans to enter a couple of 1,300-pounders in a weigh-off in either Wisconsin or Minnesota this weekend, and true to his hobby’s compulsive form, even as he prepares for those contests he is busy mapping his strategies for next year.

       

A professional tree trimmer by trade, Mr. Young, 47, spends $8,000 a year on his pumpkin hobby, money he admits he does not really have. His modest one-bedroom house is smaller than his backyard.

      

 “If you try to make a living growing pumpkins, you better have something to fall back on,” he said about his day job.

      

 Mr. Young has set state pumpkin records in both Iowa and California — in 2009 Conan O’Brien smashed one of his giant pumpkins on television with a monster truck — and he is a leading figure among those who are fashioning new growing practices. He has invented a grafting technique, for instance, that pushes the food and energy of two pumpkin plants into a single fruit. Other top pumpkin competitors are experimenting with ZeoPro, a synthetic cocktail of supernutrients developed by NASA to grow lettuce and other edible plants in space.

       

This year, several growers have also tested out a pink powder bacteria that converts a plant’s methane output into a natural growth hormone found in seaweed. Called PPFM (or pink-pigmented facultative methylotrophs), the substance is not even on the market, but the lure of the 2,000-pound pumpkin prompted those growers to obtain samples from RTI, the company in Salinas, Calf., testing the bacteria.

       

“These guys will try absolutely anything to get an edge on their competitors,” said Neil Anderson, the president of RTI.

      

 In fact, growers typically feed their pumpkins a compost “brew” so rich — the water is mixed with worm castings, molasses and liquid kelp — that the fruits can gain as much as 50 pounds a day.

       

“I like to say we’re just a big bunch of obsessive-compulsive people,” said Mr. Stelts, 52, the president of a group of giant-pumpkin enthusiasts called the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. “The stuff we do to get pumpkins to this size, it’s out of control.”

       

Sometimes, Mr. Young said, he will just sit among his pumpkins.

       

“This is going to sound really crazy, but when these are really at their peak growth, they’ll make a sound,” he said. “You can feel it. It’s something surging in the pumpkin. Bup. Bup.”

       

When the season ends, growers like Mr. Young often tow their creations to a fairground or botanical garden for display; with walls a foot thick and low sugar content, the pumpkins are not fit for pie. But this inedibility has not deterred contractors, doctors, midwives and other amateurs from growing them.

       

BigPumpkins.com, the Facebook-like forum of the giant-pumpkin world, now gets more than a million unique hits a month. And according to the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the number of officially sanctioned weigh-offs has grown from 22 to 92 in seven years, and now includes competitions in Italy, Finland and Australia.

       

With the right seeds and soil preparations, veterans say, it’s fairly easy to grow an impressively large pumpkin. But the hobby’s elite, while still amateurs, operate on a different playing field. These growers spend hundreds of dollars on laboratory analyses of soil and plant tissues to help them decide whether to add more nitrogen, say, or calcium. And they speed photosynthesis by spraying their plants’ leaves with carbon dioxide.

      

 “We’re taking a natural process and we’ve got complete control over it,” said Steve Connolly, 56, a grower in Sharon, Mass., whose pumpkins consistently rank among the world’s 10 heaviest.

      

 Taking control begins with pollination, a process that growers have wrested from the bees. In early summer, they cross-pollinate the pumpkins themselves, selecting a male flower from one plant and rubbing the pollen onto a female flower from another. Other budding pumpkins are eliminated so that the main vine supports only one plant. As extra vines sprout, they are likewise removed. The patch is more than tended. It is manicured.

       

But it is the seeds, a strong indicator of a pumpkin’s size, that are the most bankable factor in the quest for giants. Last fall, Chris Stevens, 33, a Wisconsin general contractor who grew the 1,810-pound pumpkin, sold a single seed from it for $1,600, by far the most anyone has ever paid for a pumpkin seed. Its descendants may prove just as valuable.

      

 Seed trading has helped set new world records almost every year since 1997, when a pumpkin first broke the 1,000-pound barrier. The Giant Pumpkin Commonwealth bestows special leather jackets on those who have grown a pumpkin over 1,400 pounds, a club that includes fewer than 50 gardeners. But Mr. Stelts said he was raising the minimum to 1,600 pounds because of the escalating competition.

      

 “We’d like to award everybody,” he said. “But you know what? It’s not the Boy Scouts. You’ve got to prove yourself.”

       

MR. YOUNG keeps his pumpkin trophies, ribbons and plaques in a corner of his living room. Cash winnings are reinvested in his hobby. But there is no award for what may be his greatest accomplishment: dual grafting.

       

To explain, he crouched in the dirt, pointing to a double stump that he grafted together in his kitchen last winter. Each stump is the size of a beefy forearm, and the root systems bring in twice the nutrients.

       

“They told me it couldn’t be done, they told me that for years,” said Mr. Young, who had to sacrifice 300 pumpkin seeds before he discovered the best way to fuse two young pumpkin sprouts. He borrowed a surgical knife from a hog farmer to shave the stems and then clipped them together with hair barrettes. Soon he and his wife, Julie, had to avoid knocking over pots and heat lamps spread around the kitchen counters.

       

Next year, he plans to grow all his pumpkins with grafted double sprouts. “With good weather, I can really set the world on fire,” he said. His competitive spirit is also extending beyond pumpkins; he has started to grow championship long gourds that are as thick as a bull snake.

       

Mrs. Young, 46, supports her husband’s hobby and has even won a trophy herself for pumpkin growing. “It’s exciting,” she said. “He doesn’t do anything small. He’s all in, like in poker.” She added, “People don’t realize that there’s gardening, then there’s extreme gardening.”

       

Extreme gardening involves money and sacrifice. Mr. Young wakes up in the middle of the night to check his pumpkins. He uses 27,000 gallons of water a month — nearly enough to supply a family of four for a year — and he has 80 sprinkler heads. He runs heat lamps all night after planting seeds in the chilly April ground, and cools his gourds with fans in sweltering midsummer heat. He can’t remember the last time he took a vacation.

      

 Still, for all the work, heartbreak is inevitable. A gardener can pamper his gourds for months and vigilantly stave off rot, disease and bad weather. But sometimes the giant fruits are so juiced up that they do not know how to stop feeding themselves.

       

Mr. Connolly remembers with particular sadness one morning a few years ago when he left his pumpkins to go to church. He was gone for less than an hour, but he returned to find that his biggest pumpkin had exploded under the force of its own growth spurt.

       

“There was a footlong crack through the rind,” he said. “It just blew up.”

June 2014

Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

June 2014

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ANNUAL PICNIC - MONDAY June 30th, 5:30 -8:00 p.m. at the SOLOMON WELLES HOUSE 220 Hartford Ave. Wethersfield. 

Wives, dates, guests, potential members are cordially invited.  The club will supply hot dogs, hamburgers, etc., beer, wine & soda. 

You are asked to please bring an appetizer, salad or side dish if your name comes alphabetically between Sey Adil and Fred Odell – a dessert if you are between Charlie Officer and Don Williams. Please bring your own lawn chairs.   Seating on the porch in case of rain.

Call Tony ASAP @ (860) 529-3257 to let him know how many people & what you are bringing.

A brief business meeting will be held before we dine to elect the 2014-15 club officers and to discuss possible July/August activities.

The following SLATE OF OFFICERS will be nominated at the picnic:

President:  Tony Sanders                  Secretary: James Sulzen

Vice Pres.: John Swingen                  Treasurer: Richard Prentice

Help Maintain the WESTON ROSE GARDEN Saturdays @ 8:00 am: Fellowship, witty conversation, public service and a modicum of exercise.

Compostable Matter

By Jim Meehan

Mars and I live in Connecticut – but we vacation frequently in coastal North Carolina so we know a little something about kudzu, aka Pueraria lobata, aka "The vine that ate the South." 

       

 We have in our pre-digital archives the first photo that we took upon entering the Tar Heel State for the initial time.  It was 1983 and with our son Bram we were on our way to spend two weeks at a sight-unseen RV set up by a family friend on land that he and his wife had purchased for future retirement in Carteret, N.C.  We had driven down, as we still do, through the Delmarva, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and onto the increasingly rural back roads of the south.  It was our son’s and my first time.  Mars had made a similar childhood trip with her family.

       

We all joked somewhat uneasily about the less than luxurious ambience of the surroundings that we were driving through.  Then, just across the Va.- N.C. border we saw “the house”  – a crumbling, rotting, brown wood structure enfolded and held up by a shroud of green, ever-expanding vines and leaves.  Mars hopped out to capture the sight on film.  All of us hoped that this was not a foreshadowing of what awaited us.

       

It wasn’t.

       

But each subsequent time that Mars and I have driven past the site there is more and more kudzu, and less and less building.  And I wonder – what plant is planning on devouring my neck of the woods?  And when will it (or did it) start?

       

This week I have seen two definite indicators that one or both of a pair of invasives has begun its attack.

       

Up the street from us – sad to say – is an abandoned, foreclosed abode.  A casual driver-by would not notice this condition – winter snow was removed, springtime grass is neatly mowed.   

Then the other day Mars spotted something new and strange as we drove by on our way home from the health club.  Climbing up the downspout at the front, west corner was a yellow Euonymus bush – much like the ones seen on many lawns, on many properties in central CT – much like the one in the very same geographic location of our front yard.   

It was the first time either of us had seen anything like that – from Euonymus anyway.  We’ve both seen plenty of identical behavior from Carolina Kudzu.  And we both know full well that – with plants as with other revolutionaries – a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

       

But sprawling Euonymus is awfully obvious.  Another takeover is happening beneath our line of sight – and, in fact, largely underneath the very earth that we walk upon.  I refer of course to the Queen Anne’s Lace uprising – or should I more accurately phrase it underground insurgency.

      

 In the past two weeks I have come across more wild carrots (aka Daucus carota) than I can recall in all of my nearly half-century of down and dirty gardening.  A few years ago they were a pleasant unplanned surprise addition to the variety of the landscape – now you can’t swing a dead cattail without hitting at least one (if not several) of the feathery, pinnate leaves of this biennial faux vegetable.

       

They are taking over the outer borders of just about all of our perennial beds and – worst of all and hardest to eradicate – they having taken root under (yes under) several of the most thorny bushes in the town’s Weston Rose Garden, which the members of our garden club maintain.

       

And excising these devious encroachers from their highly fortified bases of operation is no small thing – fraught with skin-piercing, blood-dripping danger. 

       

On the plus side however, since I needed to sever several little rootlets sent forth by the terrible tubers that served as the bases of these pushy plants, it did give me my first real opportunity to use the tiny sawing blade that’s stashed inside my multi-weapon Swiss-Army-like garden tool.  Removing these ginormous taproots is hard work but doable.  Not so with their threadlike appendages.

       

And, it is these partially severed tendrils that I was not able to get to the root of that I now fear the most.  As I write this, these insidious invaders are insinuating their way through the nurturing soil innocently provided by unwitting gardeners and preparing to pop up where they are least expected and most likely not wanted. 

       

Be afraid, be very afraid

Wethersfield Red Onion Shortcake

www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com

Description: This is a traditional recipe for a rich, savory shortcake that became popular in Wethersfield in the 19th century:

Ingredients:

Crust

2 cups flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons butter

1/2-3/4 cup buttermilk

Filling:

8 -10 medium onions

6 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

2 eggs, slightly beaten

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450°F.

For the crust: mix flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Work in the butter until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Slowly add the buttermilk, mixing until the mixture forms a somewhat sticky dough. Turn onto a floured board and knead briefly until smooth. Line a 9- inch springform pan with the dough and chill until ready to use.

For the filling: Saute onions in butter until transparent. Spread them over the dough. Mix the sour cream and seasonings with beaten eggs, blending thoroughly. Pour the mixture over the onions. Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the oven to 350°F and bake 45 minutes more.

Slice in wedges. Serves 4 as a main dish or 6-8 as a vegetable dish.

Discover Beneficial Weeds in the Garden

www.motherearthnews.com

Gardener, hold that hoe! Are there really beneficial weeds in the garden? Those wild volunteers do have their good points.

       

In 1879, botanist William Beal decided to see how long weed seeds could remain viable. He buried 20 jars, each filled with 1,000 seeds. Then, every five years, he dug up a jar and planted its contents to see which kernels would still sprout. After he died in 1924, colleagues continued the work. In 1979, they watched some 100-year-old seeds germinate.

       

Add longevity to productivity (some weed plants can produce as many as 40,000 seeds), and you'll realize why, left unchecked, weeds will usually outcompete your garden vegetables for sunlight, nutrients and water. No wonder most gardeners have earned the weeder's merit badges of Calloused Palm and Hoe-er's Hunchback.

       

But weeds do have their good side. Under controlled circumstances, a number of beneficial weeds can greatly benefit our gardens. They hold top-soil, pull up water and nutrients, provide food, help control insects and more.

      

 Then too, we often don't make the association between the beautiful wildflowers that erupt around us from spring through fall and the fact that most of them bloom on otherwise ordinary weeds. We should. To do otherwise would be like admiring butterflies but hating caterpillars.

       

So yes, for beauty and utility, weeds do have their good points. You'll probably always hack away at ones that crowd your crops. But when you think about all the good they can do, maybe you'll see them with a more benevolent eye, and selectively use those volunteer visitors to your garden's advantage.

Holding Topsoil

       

When we get cut, a scab forms to protect the injured spot while it's healing. In the same way, weeds bandage the earth— moving in fast wherever there's bare soil. (Any gardener can attest to that!) This is nature's way of ensuring that valuable topsoil won't be washed or blown away. Indeed, weeds have saved incalculable amounts of this precious fertile earth from erosion—and with little thanks from us.

       

So if you have an idle garden area that's coming up in weeds, consider them a free cover crop. True, if the invader is toxic (like poison ivy), a tough grass (like Johnson grass) or a perennial that spreads by underground runners (like sheep sorrel), you will want to root it out. But why not let nonspreading annuals like spurges, purslane, lamb's-quarters, chickweed and ragweed anchor that fallow ground?

      

 Just cut the plants down before they go to seed and compost them or—once they've wilted—turn them under into the soil. (If the plants have matured, you can compost them in a pile that heats up to at least 140 degrees Fahrenheit to destroy the weed seed.)

       

Pulling Up Nutrients and Water

       

Unlike our pampered produce crops, weeds have had to get by without human-supplied water and fertilizer. Hence, many have learned to send taproots down three, five or even 15 feet in search of their supper.

       

This serves the gardener in several ways. First, if we compost or turn under those weeds, the valuable nutrients and trace minerals they've brought up will get redistributed to the topsoil.

       

Weeds can also break up hardpan, that underground layer of compacted soil caused by regular mechanical cultivation. Hardpan keeps salts and other toxins from leaching downward while preventing domestic plants from reaching lower soil nutrients. It can also inhibit good soil drainage. But deep-rooted weeds like dandelions, prickly lettuce, spiny sow thistle, wild amaranths (often called pigweeds), cockleburs, nightshades and Queen Anne's lace can break that soil barrier and blaze a route for domestic roots to follow.

       

To take advantage of those weeds' soil-probing abilities, don't disturb a fallow area filled with the ground breakers, or leave a deep-reaching weed every 10 or 20 feet among your crops. Over time, this practice will do a great deal to open up your soil.  Weed roots can break a trail to underground water reserves. Moisture from those depths is also wicked upward outside the weed roots by capillary action.

Providing Food

      

 Once upon a time, the year's "Pick of the Crop" vegetable selections would have included purslane and dandelions. Lamb's-quarters would have received the seed catalog praise we now give to tomatoes. Today we neglect such no-effort crops in favor of ones that require hours of toil.

       

We shouldn't. Some weeds make superior eating. Lamb's-quarters, yellow dock, young dandelion leaves, purslane, chick-weed, land cress and sorrel have two or three times the nutritional value of spinach or Swiss chard. Try these sautéed in garlic and olive oil and drizzled with lemon juice.

Controlling Insects

       

Many weeds, either in or just outside your garden, can help control harmful insects or attract beneficial ones. Research in Florida showed that fall armyworm damage was lower in cornfields containing repellent weeds like dandelion, cockleburs and goldenrod. Other studies have proved that milkweeds repel wireworms and that grassy weeds deter many pests.

       

Some weeds can work as trap crops, luring damaging insects away from valuable vegetables. For instance, lamb's-quarters attract leafminers that might otherwise attack your spinach. And multiflora rose lures Japanese beetles away from garden goodies.

       

Then, too, several flowering weeds such as Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, evening primrose, wild mustard, amaranth and dandelion can attract beneficial insects that prey on harmful ones. More research is needed to identify repellent and attractant plants, though. Observe which ones work in your garden (try making crop sprays of some), and you could make an important discovery.

Indicating Soil Conditions

       

Like a good water dowser, certain weeds can tell you what's going on underground. This can help you when you're shopping for land, choosing a new garden site or trying to improve an existing plot. The list below shows the preferred habitat of some common weeds. But don't assume you've determined the ground conditions just because you've spotted one or two weeds in a category. Look for three or four, and check their health, as well. I've seen lamb's-quarters and sow thistle, both of which love rich soil, growing in a gravel road, but they were doing a bonsai imitation.

Really Bad Garden Jokes

http://home.golden.net

Two friars are having trouble paying off the belfry, so they open a florist shop.

       

Everyone wants to buy flowers from the men of God so business is quickly booming.

       

The florist across town sees a huge drop in sales and asks the two friars to close their shop, but they refuse.

       

A month later the florist begs the friars to close because he’s having trouble feeding his family.

       

Again, they refuse, so the florist hires Hugh McTaggert.

       

Hugh is the roughest, toughest thug in town and is hired to “persuade” the friars to close.

       

Hugh asks the friars to close their florist shop.

       

When they refuse, he threatens to beat the crap out of them and wreck their shop every day they remain open, so they close.

       

This proves once again that Hugh and only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

 

Horti-Culture Corner

“If you don’t plant, you get nothing but weeds.”

Vikrant Parsai

The nation’s farm industry depends on long-haul bee truckers – peripatetic pollinators who cross the country and travel up and down the coasts delivering swarms of bees to pollinate crops around the country. It’s a lot like other kinds of trucking and then it’s totally different.  The following song tells how different.

Truckin’ Bees

By Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf

I pulled out of Fort Myers with 500 hives

Crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, they were all still alive

From Georgia to Jersey, from pumpkins to trees

I'm the bringer of stingers, I'm still trucking bees.

Truckin' bees, truckin' bees

As nice as you please

Just haulin' some pollen

Like a portable sneeze

Give me white pills and coffee and hand me my keys

And I'll drive all night long, just as buzzed as my bees.

I can drive through the daylight with no bathroom stops

Those farmers in Maine, they need me for their crops

From berries to almonds, from peppers to peas

A collector of nectar, I'm still trucking bees.

Hear the song at http://wnpr.org/post/songwriting-colin-truckin-bees

Bee stings as therapy? Apitherapy can treat arthritis and more

E. Huff, staff writer - http://www.naturalnews.com

A bee sting is an unpleasant experience that undoubtedly everyone would choose to avoid if given the choice. However a growing number of people are choosing to be stung by bees in an alternative form of illness treatment called apitherapy. Apitherapy contends that bee venom holds therapeutic value in treating serious illness and that it is a viable alternative to dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that often do not work and have harmful side effects.

       

Apitherapy, a traditional folk remedy that has been used in many other countries for centuries, takes advantage of the healing power contained in honeybee venom which helps to alleviate serious conditions like multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and lupus. According to 51-year-old Reyah Carlson of Vermont, a proponent of apitherapy, bee venom helped to treat her Lyme Disease.

       

Carlson recently spoke at the North American Beekeepers Conference in Orlando where she spoke of the benefits of apitherapy. She regularly travels around the world telling people about the alternative treatment and informing them about how it works to treat disease.

       

Bee venom contains about 40 different healing components, one of which is melittin, a compound identified in a 2009 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts study as an anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic element. According to Carlson, melittin and the other components work together to boost immunity and quicken the healing process.

       

Besides the two percent of the U.S. population that is allergic to bees, most people stand to benefit from apitherapy treatment. While it may not necessarily cure all conditions, the venom can at least keep diseases at bay without imposing harmful side effects like drugs do. Aside from the temporary pain of the sting itself, there are virtually no other negative side effects from apitherapy.

       

Many medical professional refuse to acknowledge the benefits of apitherapy. Despite the roughly 65,000 Americans who use and benefit from bee sting therapy, the medical establishment largely rejects it as a viable treatment option. According to Carlson, many doctors believe it is dangerous and could kill people.

       

Because reactions from bee stings can vary from person to person, Carlson always carries around antihistamines for minor reactions as well as epinephrine for those who may go into anaphylactic shock. Typically no severe reaction should happen in a healthy person who is not allergic to bee stings, but Carlson keeps a safety kit on hand as a precautionary measure and advises others who use or administer the therapy to do so as well.

Companion Plants for Tomatoes

By Marie Iannotti - http://gardening.about.com

There are plants that work well together and plants that should be kept apart. Matching the two groups into a garden plan is often difficult, especially in a small space. Companion planting7 tomatoes is a lot easier than trying to lay out your entire vegetable garden with good companions.

       

Companion planting is part experience, part folklore and part wishful thinking. Most companion planting teachings are passed down by gardeners who experimented with pairing plants and had some success. However there are a lot of things that can impact the effectiveness of plant companions, so don't expect magic.

       

Luckily tomatoes make good companions with the majority of popular garden vegetables. Some companion plants help improve the health and vigor of the tomato plants, some improve the tomato flavor and other companion plants are used to repel and deter insect pests and diseases. You're probably going to grow some of these plants anyway, so why not experiment on your own and use some of them as companion plants for your tomatoes.

       

Good Tomato Companion Plants

       

A lot of plants are touted as improving the health, vigor and/or flavor of tomatoes. All of these features are hard to measure, little scientific research has actually been done to back up the claims and many other factors may be involved. Still, it's interesting to try them out in your own garden.

       

Plants Recommended for Companion Planting with Tomatoes:

       

Amaranth helps repel insects.

       

Basil repels insects and disease, improves growth and flavor. Repels mosquitoes and flies (even fruit flies).

       

Borage improves growth and flavor and repels tomato worms26. (I've not found this to be true.)

       

Bee balm, chives, dill, mint and parsley improve health and flavor. Use dill early since mature dill starts to inhibit tomato growth.

       

Carrots planted near tomatoes may not get as large as they should, but they'll still taste good.

      

 Garlic repels red spider mites. Garlic sprays help control late blight.

       

Stinging nettle nearby improves taste.

       

Sow thistle aids growth.

       

Bad Companions for Tomatoes

       

Cabbage (Brassica) Family  - stunt the growth of tomato plants, (incl: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collards, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, rutabaga, turnip).

       

Corn - The corn earworm is the same as the tomato fruitworm. (Also known as the cotton bollworm.)

       

Dill - Mature dill plants, as mentioned above, will start to inhibit tomato plant growth. Plant the dill you want to go to seed away from your tomatoes.

       

Eggplant, Peppers and Potatoes - These plants are in the same family as tomatoes and are all susceptible to early and late blight, which will build up in the soil and get worse each year. Avoid planting them near each other or in place of each other for at least 3 years. Also planting tomatoes near potatoes can make the potatoes more susceptible to potato blight.

       

Fennel - Inhibits tomato plant growth.

       

Walnuts - Don't plant tomatoes under walnut or butternut trees, which produce an allelopathic chemical called juglone that inhibits the growth of tomatoes (and all the members of the nightshade family). Tomatoes are also susceptible to the disease walnut wilt.